Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing; and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles. He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.

We talked about how he puts a collection together, vulnerability and guardedness, To the Lighthouse, relationships, darkness, truth and revelation.

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